Windows Vista and Crashing Hard Drives

Computers and I have a love/hate relationship. I depend on them heavily for my day to day life. I communicate with them, almost exclusively (I am not a phone person really most of the time), I make all my money on or through them, I get my news and entertainment from them. I guess I am one big geek. I’ve been heavily in to computers since way back in the 80s when I stood around the store programming in basic code in the display computers just to draw a flag or something while my mom shopped. My first computer was a TI99/4a. I thought it was GREAT. My mom worked at TI at the time and got discounts at the employee store, so I had the whole setup.

Man I thought that was great. There were some games on cartridges, as well as some programs. I had a floppy disk drive, the BIG ones, the latest in home computer technology. I even had a cassette deck that you loaded and saved your programs from. It was awesome and the greatest thing I thought I would ever have then. I spent hours learning to program in BASIC, making some crude games and other such things. Looking back, I rarely did anything productive with it though. The coolest thing was I could put my phone receiver in a little cradle, and punch in some phone numbers to Compuserve and for something like $5.99 an hour I was in touch with the world through a touch screen. Man those were the days.

Fast forward a couple of decades, and I now have more computer power in my chase vehicle than NASA used in a spacecraft to send men to the moon! Dual and quad core processors, ungodly amounts of data storage and gigs upon gigs of memory, folks like me are completely spoiled these days. Now I plug in a little card not much bigger than a credit card and am connected to the entire world from the middle of nowhere, in touch with every piece of information known to man, for $60 a month. It’s incredible when you really think about it.

And of course along with MORE cool stuff, also comes MORE problems. Last month, the primary hard drive on my desktop decided to start making horrible grinding sounds and everything slowed down. For those less geeky readers among you, horrible grinding sounds coming from a hard drive to us geeks is equivalent to someone shoving toothpicks under your toenails. The first thing that shoots through your mind was when the last time you backed up your important files to another medium, and what are you about to loose. The next thing is you know your in for a few days of reinstalling windows and all your crap on a new hard drive.

Luckily I am fairly good about backups (not as good as I would like to be, considering my anal retentive nature), so I wasn’t too concerned. I got to thinking, while my desktop was still running everything I want it to fine, it was a bit old (in computer years I think it was around 40 years old). I build it 4 years ago and have only upgraded the RAM, video card, sound card and the secondary hard drive in the last 4 years. It’s an AMD 3000+, had 3 gigs of ram. The main hard drive was 120 gigs, and the secondary one I added later for video editing was 320 gigs. The motherboard has a feature you can see how many hours are on your computer. There was something like 34 thousand hours (I leave it on all the time, letting it go in to sleep mode at night). Holy cow!

Well I made the decision to move the secondary 320 gig hard to the primary, and do a clean install of Windows XP. Of course this came at a time when a regular project I do every 2 weeks was due in 3 days, so it was most inconvenient to say the least. So here I am, installing XP on the desktop, while I have the laptop sitting to the side working on the project while I wait for windows updates etc. I decided during this time, I would go ahead and plan to build a new desktop and worked out a wonderful plan for an AMD quad core based system. Problem is, heading in to chase season, I didn’t want to dump all the money on those parts at once, so I decided over the next few months I would gather the parts when they were on sale at Newegg, and get whatever I was lacking at the end of the primary chase season. I have a 500gig external drive I could use for video editing, so yeah, that would work. That was the plan anyway…

So fast forward to a few days ago. I am happily running on the 320 gig hard drive when my virus scanner updated it’s definitions and wanted to reboot. No problem, routine stuff. Click to reboot…. boot screen hangs on hard drive detection. WTH? Tried several times, same thing every time. After an entire day of troubleshooting that, I finally was able to get in and run a chkdsk from command prompt and got a return message that said “This drive is so screwed up, a team of crack nerds from MIT couldn’t get it to work again”. Ok, so maybe it didn’t say that, but the message was catastrophic and final. This drive would never work properly again. The boot sector is hosed. This drive is no more. It has ceased to be. It’s expired and gone to meet it’s maker. It’s a stiff. Bereft of life it rests in peace. Pushing up daises. It’s electronic processes are now history. It’s off it’s cable, kicked the bucket, shuffled off it’s mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir. This is an EX-hard drive!

Ok so this is bad. I could buy a replacement drive, and considered that option. Internal disk drives are now apparently on the endangered species list in the retail stores now, but you can buy 6000 versions of external drives however. The issue is, my desktop requires EIDE, and all the newer drives are SATA. They aren’t interchangeable, and my motherboard doesn’t have the capability of running SATA drives. I hated to spend money on an aging EIDE format when the new drives I would buy for my planned computer would be SATA drives. Not to mention not having much of a selection in the retail stores. By not much of a selection, I mean 3 drives at each store! I had to have this up and running NOW. I had projects due and can’t be waiting around a week for UPS to deliver one from online retail.

After a day of searching I finally decided I would just hit the local rent to own shop and see what they got. I decided I would just rent it to the end of the chase season, and ramp up my efforts in the meantime to gather all my parts for my new system. The plus was I got to use a brand new HP machine in the meantime, with a dual core processor and 2 gigs of ram. Yeah, that would work, so I got it.

Quickly discovered the build in video card was CRAP for running most of my stuff however. So I thought I would stick in my old video card, which was halfway decent, and ATI x1650 with 512 megs or RAM on it. Not top of the line by any means, but still holds it’s own. Oh crap, another problem…it’s an AGP slot card, and the motherboard on the rental computer only has PCIe slots. Damn! Well, it is an older video card, what the heck, I’ll just get a newer PCIe based one, since that would fit my new system I am building later, and I can use it there. To my surprise Best Buy was having a terrific sale on ATI video cards last week, and I picked up a pretty decent one for half price! An ATI Radeon HD2600 Pro with 512 megs of ram onboard AND it supports CROSSFIRE (SLI) mode, so I can run two of them in tandem, and it even does dual monitors. Yeah that would work just fine! They also had one heck of a deal on the type of memory the rental computer took (which already had 2 gigs) so I bought a couple more gigs and now running at 4 gigs.

Well, the downside to the rental computer, it’s Windows Vista (aka Windows ME2). My first plan was to do a clean install of XP on it. I had made the restore disks (HP doesn’t give them to you any more, you have to make them when you first boot up the computer), so returning it to original condition before returning the machine later wasn’t an issue. Problem was, HP doesn’t list ANY XP drivers for this machine, and I didn’t have a lot of hours to fart around the net looking for them. I finally decided, everything is moving to Vista, I might as well make this a big turning point in my computer user history and move to Vista and learn it. I knew it had some issues, but they are getting worked out regularly and service packs are coming. I also have Vista on the laptop I use for chasing, and had decided to switch it to XP, but now I thought I would give it a run on Vista. So Vista here we go.

So far I haven’t really had much issue on the desktop with Vista. Some of my programs required updates or upgrades, but for the most part it was trouble free. The biggest issue was the the new “Windows Email”, the successor to Outlook Express, didn’t allow for multiple identities without you creating multiple logins on Vista. This was a big issue since I was an avid user of Outlook Express. The search for a solution brought me to Mozilla Thunderbird. I wish I had discovered this earlier. I was already a big fan of Firefox Browser, and so far I LOVE Thunderbird for email! That problem solved. Still have a few programs to get installed today before I can get back to work, but overall, things are going smoothly on my desktop.

I wish I could say the same for my laptop. A few days ago I started getting this server authentication error on my wireless network on it. But the network was working. Some other things were also affected as well. After some google research, I found a band-aid for the network problem, but this problem is more deeply rooted. I really discovered that Sunday when I was trying to install some more of my programs I use for chasing, namely my Canon software and Adobe Premier. After hours of attempting that with no success, I finally gave up. I decided that was going to HAVE to go back to XP I think. I can’t be having issues like that on the road when I depend on that machine heavily.

So out chasing yesterday (and yes a chase report post is coming with pics!) just as I pull up on a tornadic storm, Vista just out of the blue decides it needs to reboot itself. Of course that mean I had to get all my GPS and radar programs back up and running.

So it’s been a headache with the computers lately and I can only tell you that this would be a great time to buy some stock in Tylenol, because with the amount I need to get rid of these headaches, it’s bound to go up! Hopefully soon I can get things back to normal, whatever that is for me, and get back to regular work clearing out some projects. And here I was a couple of months ago, hoping to get everything cleared out so I could start the chase season stress-free for a change this time. The best laid plans of mice and men…

Written by David on March 18th, 2008 with 4 comments.
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